Abstract

Solid phase crystallization (SPC) of amorphous silicon films grown by low pressure chemical vapor deposition was conducted using a tube furnace in nitrogen ambient at temperatures ranging from 560 °C to 1000 °C. The transformed crystalline fraction shows typical sigmoidal curves as a function of annealing time using Raman analysis adopted in this work. Arrhenius plot of the measured incubation time does not fit to the straight line since SPC kinetics has strong temperature dependence and since the heating rate is slow when using a conventional heating method. The grain size decreases as the annealing temperature increases. It, however, is not sensitive to the annealing temperature beyond 800 °C, since SPC kinetics is complete during the period of heating-up according to Raman spectroscopy. It was observed that doping of impurity atoms affect the crystallization kinetics.

Received 06 June 2013Accepted 05 August 2013Published online 20 August 2013

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported by the IT R&D program of MOTIE/KEIT [10043413, Development of Heat Treatment Processes for Fabrication of Next-Generation Flat Panel Displays and Semiconductor Devices Using Rapid Heating Methods].